


how firm a foundation

by propinquitous



Series: us sorry animals [2]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Body Dysphoria, Cooking, Depression, Disability, Fights, Found Family, Grief/Mourning, Haircuts, Healing, Life-Affirming Sex, M/M, Making Up, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts, Trauma, turns out resurrection can really fuck up your sense of self
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-27
Updated: 2020-07-27
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:35:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25555186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propinquitous/pseuds/propinquitous
Summary: Resurrection is a process. There are steps and stages. It is not a singular event.Yet Quentin wanted Eliot's gratitude. To be seen. Some torn up part in him still calling out Please just for fucking once can't you understand that I died and it wasn't for you but it wasn't not for you and and now I'm alive and what the fuck you do you want? What do you want? What the fuck— what more could I possibly give you than my own life?
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: us sorry animals [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1751188
Comments: 41
Kudos: 114





	how firm a foundation

**Author's Note:**

> much like the first fic in this series, this takes place in pretty messy headspace. while it's not a story about unending despair, it is definitely about sitting with ugly and unkind feelings toward yourself and others- so just a heads up on that note. it's also not technically necessary to have read the first fic, but they are meant to go together and i think the events of this story make more sense if you have.
> 
> thanks to isabel for enabling my inner trash baby and for the beta; thanks as always to em and ibby for all the cheerleading and for listening to me whine. this was a weird story to work through and i'm so grateful for all of you.

"I'm sorry," Quentin gasped, "I'm not, I need to stop."

"Okay," Eliot said, and sat up, pulling back and away from where he had been touching Quentin. It had only been his ribs. Eliot had only been touching his ribs with his big hands that Quentin loved. But it had been— "Too much?" 

Quentin nodded. On his palms Eliot leaned forward to kiss his cheek. Then his neck. "It's okay." Too gentle, always too understanding. He had the sense that he had not earned it. That Eliot's affection was something of a participation trophy for coming back to life. Even here, mostly naked in the bed that they shared, he wished that for once Eliot would get angry with him. That he would show even the smallest hint of frustration. A pinched brow or a frown for the delicate corners of his mouth. Instead he only smiled, soft. Sad. A waning crescent, Quentin imagined. Make me earn it, he thought. Then Eliot laid down and pulled Quentin onto his chest and the thought was gone.

"You wanna talk about it?"

Quentin shook his head. His cheek pressed against Eliot’s skin. "It's okay. Just anxious, I guess."

"If you're sure." He squeezed Quentin's shoulder and Quentin kissed his jaw. His breath smelled of gin.

"I'm sure."

It was only mid-afternoon. Quentin slept. 

—

There was a hand in Quentin's hair. It pushed his not-quite-bangs back from his forehead and then there were lips on his clammy skin. Warm and slightly sour breath.

"Hey, sweetheart," Eliot said. "I'm going to take a shower. You getting up or sleeping?"

"I'll get up," Quentin said. Forced a smile onto his face. He had been wrong he realized. Eliot was the sun, not the moon. Quentin just reflected his light.

Eliot kissed him again and left. In the haze of sleep Quentin thought, Stop being so gentle with me. He tasted vinegar in his mouth the second the thought formed and he banished it. Like a puff of smoke or nimbus cloud. The steam that now poured from the bathroom where Eliot bathed. Quasar emerged from somewhere beneath the bed and flopped beside him in a huff.

On the horizon the sun sat cradled in the hammock of evening. Half of the windows in their— _their_ , that most bizarre and unexpected plural— in their bedroom faced west. Before Quentin had avoided this room both because it was the largest and did not suit him and also because it was too bright and too hot by four o'clock. But it was nice, now. Almost. In the early summer that still masqueraded as late spring. When the sun lit the landscape of Eliot's body. Made his freckles dark shadows like lamp posts across the plains. Shaped his shoulders into rolling hills. When the saturated orange and sometimes pink of the sunset lit the bedroom so warmly and with such romance that he could almost forget all that had passed before he was dead.

He pushed his hand into the plush fur of Quasar's belly. When he began to purr Quentin felt the rumbling through his fingertips and slept again for an hour or maybe two. Eventually he rose to brush his teeth and tuck his face briefly into his armpit and deem himself acceptable. He avoided his reflection as he did so.

The feelings of discomfort and disgust that so often accompanied diagnoses such as his he had for all of his life avoided. Yet since coming back to life he found that he could barely stand to look at himself. As if the body he had come back to was not his but instead a grotesque facsimile. It was awful to look at and he avoided doing so at most costs. His reflection in the bathroom mirror still bore he thought the signs of his recent state. His chest thinner than it once was. His hair though shorter now still somehow always lank. His face smudged like an expressionist painting but not the sort at which people looked and felt inspired or joyful or otherwise moved. The sort at which people looked and tilted their heads and muttered _Huh_.

He finished and did his best to dress himself. When he emerged he found Eliot chopping broccoli in the kitchen.

Eliot said, "Hey." His voice and eyes were warm and Quentin felt himself go soft. Like a lit candle or perhaps an overripe avocado.

"Hey."

"I was thinking we could throw together something with that pesto we have? Roast vegetable salad?"

Quentin shrugged. "Sure. I'll make some spaghetti." He let his fingers trail over the small of Eliot's back as he walked past him to the sink. The topography of his spine. Here and there the ridges of his ranges.

The pot once filled was heavy in Quentin’s hands and he fought a childish urge to throw it onto the stove. To see how far it might splatter.

He pulled dried pasta from the pantry. Though it lacked a label on its geometric container, something that might have come from IKEA but certainly had not by the standards of this apartment, it was he was certain the brand that Alice liked. It was thick and hard to cook beyond al dente; it leached lots of starch, which was good for sauces. He almost smiled at the memory of her. At the way she batted his hand away when he tried to oil the water— _Quentin, salt and a roiling boil are plenty._ The way she'd always stood over the pot anyway armed with a slotted spoon. How the pasta stuck neither to itself nor the pot. He felt a small pang in this chest at the knowledge that she was still in the universe. Making not just a life but a world. She deserved it.

"What're you smiling about?" Eliot said as he hooked his chin over Quentin's shoulder. His hair tickled Quentin's ear and made him shiver. It brought him back into his body. He could picture it, almost. His formless thoughts like a ghost pressing down onto his shoulders until he was once again enlivened. An imaginary puppeteer lowering him by his strings back onto the stage.

Quentin turned his face to kiss the corner of Eliot's mouth. "I like this pasta."

"Mm, that was Alice's, I think." Quentin could hear the slight edge to his voice. The gentle sort of jealousy that Eliot thought he hid in his regal airs. In the fact that most of his friends could not meet his gaze without looking up.

"I know. She has good taste in carbs."

Eliot hummed and scratched his bearded chin along Quentin's neck until goosebumps rose along his arms. His nose scrunched and he felt the strings connected to his mouth pull up into a smile. Quasar howled and observed them from the back of the sofa into which his grey fur almost blended. Eyes like marbles on the asphalt.

"Quit it."

"Never," Eliot said. He placed a kiss on the knob of Quentin's spine before he retreated to the fridge. "Something to drink?"

"Sure," Quentin shrugged. He stirred the pot while Eliot casually measured and poured and stirred.

"Whiskey sour," Eliot pronounced as he passed Quentin a glass. He felt the edge of frustration dull with his first sip and finished his glass perhaps too quickly. He would wait on a second until they ate.

Quentin wondered if he should be worried about how much they drank. About how much Eliot drank. Though they tried to fill the time, the days still dragged and blurred into one another. There was little in the way of structure. There were no classes to attend or worlds to be saved. It was just the two of them. Tidying the apartment or tending to the cat or curled up on the couch. In the long stretches of daylight punctuated only occasionally by rain or clouds and never as they once would have been by the lives of other people or crises. Not even Eliot's melodramatics.

Thus their days unmarked by routine as they were began to form themselves around when it was acceptable to drink. A distinction which made less and less of a difference as they woke at increasingly odd hours and made Quentin wonder if three a.m. might be in the realm of day drinking. Of late he had begun to suspect that his own admittedly less severe but still what a professional might call unhealthy level of consumption was fueled by a series of factors.

First: Eliot. Quentin could not remember if he had behaved this way when they arrived at the mosaic. If it was a symptom of isolation or something deeper. He wasn't certain but he thought that Eliot had not been so subdued as he was now. Not quite so gentle. In fact he seemed to have come to an unspoken conclusion that he should comport himself with a bizarre kind of dignity. A quietness which did not suit him. More than once Quentin wondered what Eliot had not told him. What he would not tell him. It added to the sense that Quentin had of being maneuvered as a marionette through the artfully decorated set of the apartment. That Eliot was simply another character in the shadowbox of his second life.

It was frustrating in the way it had always been. Eliot's inability to admit when things were wrong. Perhaps even to recognize it. Quentin had in his death mused on the question, Did what happened to Eliot crack him open and grow in his chest a new capacity for intimacy. As if he could watch it all in a crystal ball down below. But that had not happened. Quentin could not tell yet if he resented Eliot for it or not. The failure to live up to an imagined expectation. He thought that probably he did, but knew better than to say so even to himself. Eliot was not the only one with a well-cultivated capacity for self-deception.

Second there was a guilt that built up in him. Salt deposits that would eventually give way to rust. He could not shake the sense that he did not sufficiently appreciate this new life he had been given. Not if he was like this. Not if he was so quick to rinse the time away under a steady current of wine so rushing as to prevent the growth of anything new. He wanted to be grateful. He wanted to wake up early and drink coffee with his hands wrapped around the mug and to inhale the steam and sit at the island and admire Eliot's movements while he fried eggs or cut bread for French toast. Most concisely put he wanted to feel good. Yet instead he found himself up late each night drinking wine or whiskey and waking up the next morning or afternoon entirely miserable in a way that only another drink could abate.

So the days passed. Passed again. Each under a haze which not even Eliot's loving touch seemed able to clear. Often he thought, If I can just get through today, tomorrow will be better. And awoke the next morning to find that it was not.

Finally, third: an irritation with each of these things and with himself for feeling any of it at all. Like an eddy the sense that he should be gentler both with himself and with Eliot churned beneath his skin. It made him restless. It made his fingers twitch. And when Eliot was kind to him it seemed to whip itself into more of a cyclone or tsunami that crested and crashed within him. Left him barely holding back all the caustic half-truths that wanted to come spilling out from behind his teeth: I don't deserve this. Why haven't you changed at all. Please don't go.

Still he sighed when Eliot pressed against his back. A turtle shell. The armor he lacked himself. Whatever his irritation or anger Eliot's embrace seemed to calm him. A high pressure system forcing him back down. He craned his neck to kiss Eliot's cheek. He felt contained and tried to appreciate it. He had been lately struggling so hard to contain the octopus arms that his broken brain had sprouted in response to something like the radiation of his death.

Eliot's arms. Eliot's hands. To have and to hold. 

When the pasta was finished he reserved a cup of its water and drained the rest before he tossed it into a bowl with the pesto that Eliot had made and frozen some weeks ago into cubes. A trick, he said, he had learned from his mother, though she had mostly used it for the stock she made from old vegetables and bones. When Eliot had told him this casually as he rinsed the basil Quentin had not known what to say or what he should do with this precious insight into Eliot's childhood though later he felt as though he should build a small shrine to it in Eliot's nightstand: Annie Waugh, patron saint of soup.

Quentin served their bowls. The smell of the herbs and the garlic and then of the cheese which Eliot swiftly grated on top stirred something sweet in him that was not unlike he thought the tender leaves that Eliot had so tenderly handled. The knowledge that Eliot had made this food for him and he had made this food for Eliot churned what was acrid in him into butter. Beside him, Eliot lifted a plate of broccoli which he had in the meantime roasted in salute and smiled silently. They made their way to the table jostling gently against one another's shoulders. Branches in the wind.

While Eliot settled, Quentin admired him. The sweep of his hair and the way as it dried it formed those wild curls that Eliot had not thought to tame much of late. The dimple of his chin dark with his beard. The delicate movement of his clavicles under the open collar of shirt which brought to mind in a way nothing else did those years they had spent together making love under a thatched roof while their temples greyed. 

"You're staring," Eliot said. The fond curve of his mouth.

"Can you blame me?"

"Suppose not," and Eliot's smile then was enough almost to make Quentin forget about the unease that had seethed in him at the feeling of Eliot's hands on his body that did not feel like his body. He could sit here at the table with a man who loved him. He thought that maybe they could try again. That maybe he could touch Eliot instead this time and that might help to return to himself. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Quentin said and shrugged. "I'm sorry, about—" He shrugged again. The embarrassment he would've felt at such a situation several years ago was there but dulled. Like an old greeting card stuck on the fridge. A sun-faded Easter bunny that while harder to distinguish was still recognizable against a backdrop of pastel greenery.

"It's okay. I can't imagine how hard it's been."

Quentin shrugged again and shook his head. He could not bear to meet Eliot's eyes because he knew what waited for him: understanding, patience. He wanted again for Eliot to be angry with him. Or he wanted to want it. But the fight seemed to have gone out of him. He felt deflated or lost. Like the mylar of his composure had not so much burst as it had simply floated away.

Dinner passed without incident. More than once Quentin caught Eliot staring at him. Observing him. He wondered what he saw. If there was in his eyes an image less like the one Quentin had seen in the bathroom earlier. If there was maybe something shining in him that Eliot could see through the muck and the murk. He wanted to believe it. If there was something beneath the anger and the guilt that made him worthwhile.

Quentin tried to imagine a sort of glowing orb beneath his sternum as he sat down on the couch. He could be he thought what Eliot might see in him. He could be the light thing beneath. He could let Eliot see it.

He practiced this transparency as he left room for Eliot next to the arm like Quentin knew he preferred. Where he could take the weight off of his right arm which seemed to be in pain but which Eliot had not mentioned. 

"You were right," Eliot said. The couch cushion sank with his weight and pulled Quentin closer to him. He passed Quentin a drink. Their third, fourth? Quentin wondered again if he should worry.

"About what?" He took a sip of his drink. It didn't burn anymore.

"Alice has good taste in carbs. I'm so full," Eliot sighed and laughed, as if confiding something.

Quentin nodded. He thought, Yes, that's what I said. And yet it felt different coming from Eliot's mouth. Like a challenge. Like a sort of absolution if only Quentin could keep from rising to it. He held his muscles in place and did not flinch. The glowing thing in his chest flickered. Levelly he said, "She has good taste in a lot of things." He tossed his legs over Eliot's lap and smiled, his best warm smile. I know what you want from me. I know what will convince you that I'm happy to be alive. And I want, God I want. To be glad to be alive. To be good at it. 

"Does she?" That hint of jealousy. Quentin shook his head and smiled as best he could. 

"Well, not men, I guess," Quentin said and the laugh that tumbled out of him was thinner than even he would have expected. He felt the patina of mild humor fading, as quickly as it had come. 

"I wouldn't say that," Eliot said gently. Again Quentin thought, Stop it, stop doing that. 

"Wouldn't you?" His tone was he thought still even. A long time seemed to pass in which Quentin peeled back the dry cuticle of a thumb until it bled.

"Well. I guess I'm happy to take her sloppy seconds." Quentin did not look up in time to see his expression. He searched desperately in his memory to find where their path had diverged into this. Probably he had said something wrong or with a bad tone. He sighed and leaned his head back against the couch and did not say anything else. 

In the end they were watching TV. Top Chef or maybe something stupid like Love Island or maybe something real with narrative structure and decisions made by storytellers instead of unhinged production decisions driven by ad revenues. Still he found that more relatable. Likely that was what they were watching.

It began when his toes got cold. The air conditioning was on too high. It made him shiver and it felt not unlike walking through a door. His chest began to feel tight. There was a burning like perhaps whatever was light in him had passed from warmth and into flame. A tightness in his throat like a tightrope or catgut. Every word carefully balanced.

He finished his drink. Set the glass down too forcefully. He tried to trace that path of the last several hours and tried to find the place where they had diverged. As if when in search of refuge from a flood they had instead turned toward a forest fire.

Probably he had fucked up. Because it was always his fault, wasn't it. Because it always was. No one else ever fucked up as badly as he did. Like some sort of lowest common denominator. It would always come down to where Quentin had gone wrong.

Then the anger. Because it couldn't all be Quentin's fault. Not really. A fact at the center: that Eliot could never take responsibility for anything and it would always be Quentin. Quentin who ruined things. Probably he shouldn't say anything right now because what he felt first rose bitter in his lungs like smoke and burned and burned and even as he felt that last second in which he might push it down and save himself and Eliot from his most destructive impulses he could not stop himself from saying— 

"Maybe you should reconsider."

"What?" 

"If I'm sloppy seconds. Maybe you should just. You know. Not be with me. Maybe I'm not worth your highly refined time or whatever—" he swallowed around nothing and felt like some sort of uncontrolled— like an actual raccoon who couldn't keep himself from digging into the trash or a fucking, a fucking lemur or a possum or something. Jesus. Whatever. A fucking animal. "You knew you were too good for me the last time so. Don't see what has changed."

Not ungracefully Eliot pushed Quentin's feet from their spot on his lap. There was a tenderness even in his irritation. Or an irritation in his tenderness. It was not always easy to tell with Eliot, which direction things went.

Quentin took the cue of his feet on the floor to leave. He walked away to the pantry and found a jar of so-called natural peanut butter that Julia must have left. From there he procured a spoon from the center drawer although he did not fail to reach for the left first. The split-second surge of annoyance that Eliot had come in and moved things around. As if he had the right. He scooped a liberal spoonful of peanut butter that was much too oily for such an application and stood not looking at Eliot over the span of the kitchen island. A continent between them. The marble or quartz or whatever it was that the original terrible owners had installed glistened in the low light and Quentin realized too late that it was not so much whatever mica might be in the stone as it was his own failure to be a person that blurred his vision.

He licked the spoon. His throat was tight and his mouth was dry. For a minute or maybe more he sat staring into the blank pit at the center of the jar where the oil seeped. 

Something about it— why had Julia bought this stupid shit? He should call her tomorrow and ask. Though they had not spoken since he had first met the baby in her arms. When he had smiled and cooed and mimed shaking Penny's hand through the screen while beneath the table Eliot's hand attempted to soothe Quentin's bouncing leg. When he had felt instead of joy only a strange acerbic envy— not of her or of Penny precisely but of the ease, the normalcy that they had seemed to step into. It had infuriated him. To be moved on from. And it had been worse because any expression of such a feeling would only— rightfully— be met with accusations of jealousy. As if they had not long since moved beyond 2010 and Quentin's inability to distinguish attraction from love. As if Julia did not deserve whatever would make her happy.

So he wouldn't call. Too afraid of his inability to share what was new and shining in her.

But no one really must enjoy it. This fucking peanut butter. Just buy Jif like a normal person, he thought. It spreads easier. Who the fuck wants this? To have to spread with a knife or more realistically a spoon and who wants to spread peanut butter with a spoon— this weird grainy— nut butter, really? He bit into the mass of it and longed for the soft texture of Skippy which his father had always preferred because it had less sugar, or so he had said.

Something else rose in his chest then that smothered the light that he thought might be there. He wondered if Eliot could see it, too. Like bile in his throat it rose and it rose and his arms shook with it as he licked the spoon and he tried not to look at Eliot and he tried not to say it but he was angry at Julia and he was angry at his father and Eliot was here and he had hurt Quentin once and he could not stop the way the words kept swirling in him like a nausea. 

"This is fucking stupid," Quentin said. He threw the spoon into the sink and stood over it. Their dishes stained with pesto that had once been sweet now turned black in the water. 

"What is?"

Quentin turned and gestured wildly at the sink, at the stove, at the pantry. "This stupid goddamn peanut butter. Everything. What the fuck is the point? Of any of this?" 

Eliot did not respond and only looked at his palms and Quentin saw his curls wild behind his ears and he could not explain why but in that moment he saw not a partner or a magician or a king but only a man who loved him too much and all wrong. Like a child who didn't understand why they couldn't live on cake and ice cream and fucking— caramel. That it would rot their teeth. Why couldn't he see that he should stop?

As he stood there Quentin wondered again what had happened when he was dead. Still Eliot had not gone into details. He had given only summaries, as if a Wikipedia article were enough to understand how Eliot Before had become Eliot After, the Eliot Now that Quentin had to live with. He felt as though he stood on the other side of a confessional booth, the Swiss cheese grate of it through which Eliot would not speak and which Quentin was not able to telegraph anything via his face or his body or his hands as foreign to himself as they were. He knew Eliot so well and yet he thought he did not know this man in front of him at all. This person who would not allow.

That's what Eliot was doing, wasn't he? Not just loving Quentin too hard but loving him incomprehensibly. Without reason. And what was the point if Quentin couldn't understand? What was the point of this apartment and of this peanut butter and of coming back from the dead?

And then— 

"Why are you so intent on making it hard to love you?"

Quentin looked at Eliot when he was done. His expression was blank.

"Is that what I'm doing?" Eliot said. His jaw set. 

"It sure seems that way."

"Oh, fuck you, Quentin." With that Eliot went to the liquor cabinet and filled his glass most of the rest of the way with whiskey and went out onto the balcony. The glass in the door rattled and then Quentin was alone. 

For a few minutes or a long while Quentin stood there. His chest seething in a way which he imagined to be artful like Starry Night. Beautiful. Nothing like the mess of himself.

The jar of peanut butter still open on the counter. 

He stared at it awhile and debated hitting it off the counter. He imagined it perfectly: how the plastic might split in a crack but not splatter. How the oil would seep and stain the precisely unfinished shelving of the pantry. How no matter what they’d never be able to clean it up or scrub the fat from the wood.

It would bother Eliot. To have such a mess. So he didn't. Instead he set the jar in the sink and filled it with water to rinse out later for recycling. He poured himself some whiskey and tap water called it enough and walked out onto the balcony.

First he saw Eliot's back. The lines of it that he adored. At his muscles he thought again of topography like the oceanic science class he had taken in the tenth grade. The planes and the troughs of it. Even in his anger he wanted to kiss the peaks of his scapulae like an explorer in a new mountain range glad for the summit.

Instead he only walked to stand beside Eliot at the railing. Silence, again. The wrought iron still cold beneath his hands somehow despite the oncoming summer. He wondered stupidly if his hands were just cold. If maybe he were still dead.

He did not touch Eliot. He stood beside him and felt the warmth through his long and rolled-up sleeves but he did not touch him. He wished he could. He could feel he thought the heat of his forearms but probably that was just his own desire. 

He could still remember if he tried. The stretch of Eliot's tendons placing tiles. How his biceps strained when he'd hoisted Teddy into the air and later into the creek down the hill. The flex of his back damp with sweat in the fire light.

What was the point though. What was the fucking point.

As he stood there silently while Eliot was silent Quentin thought he should be enraged but felt instead only a bottomless sort of vacancy. Like an empty well into which a frayed rope hung.

He looked down at the street as if looking into that well and thought with the abrupt profundity of drunkenness that he had always been afraid of becoming his father. A man who was kind but who never spoke. Who was bright but not warm like a sort of false hearth but who could not be accused of such for the structure he provided. For the light.

Yet. The truth of Quentin's own early and violent confrontations with mental illness had left him with an acute awareness of who his father was: kind. Forgiving. And also who he wasn't: a man who could not name his own anxieties. His own— his own shitty brain. The sort of silent man who waited only for other people to speak. Who allowed the silence of others to become an excuse for his own.

Quentin loved his father. For this reason he wanted to be better.

He tried, "I—" 

"You know," Eliot cut him off. Quentin waited while Eliot looked at the ground some hundred feet below and sipped his drink and shook his head. What do I know, he wondered. What the fuck do I know. When have I ever known anything. "I didn't even want you to make that pasta. I just wanted some fucking squash. But you didn't fucking— you didn't hear me and you didn't ask. And now we're here and I'm pissed off and you're pissed off and I know there are a lot of things— _wrong_ with me but I wish. I wish you would listen more. I feel like I deserve that, Q. Your attention."

Quentin grimaced. He knew what Eliot said was true and he resented him for his faithfulness. Because what the fuck did he think he was doing, claiming ownership of such a virtue. Who was this Eliot who suddenly decided to be honest. Who allowed his wants and needs to come to the surface like fat to be skimmed. 

And Quentin had fucking come back from the dead. He had done that and it had not been because Eliot or Julia or Alice or anyone else had tried. If he could not explain why he at least knew it was not their doing. That no one else had brought him back. He had walked through that door alone.

His fingers tight around the bannister. Sweat of his palms. The anger again.

He wished it were— he wished he had someone to blame. For the way he felt. But he didn't. And so he could not give Eliot such credit either. Yet he wanted his gratitude. To be seen. Some torn up part in him still calling out Please just for fucking once can't you understand that I died and it wasn't for you but it wasn't not for you and and now I'm alive and what the fuck you do you want? What do you want? What the fuck— what more could I possibly give you than my own life?

He said, "Aren't you happy to be here with me? Aren't you happy I'm alive? Why isn't that enough?"

Eliot shook his head and looked heavenward. Quentin saw then that Eliot's eyes shone. His stomach hurt. Still he held onto the bannister and would not let himself look away.

"Q," Eliot began. At that Quentin looked down at the few cars that passed below. Their headlights bright. He wished stupidly for a light for his path. For a path at all. For some sort of clarity or guidance or anything that was not this bumbling fucking mess. He sighed and shook his head and gritted his teeth and tried to feel— anything before Eliot spoke again.

"I don't know how to make it clear that a lot of other shit happened. You didn't just die. I _lost_ you. It was like a part of me was ripped out. And then I had to find time to grieve in between everyone needing something." He laughed and shook his head shortly as if water were in his ears. "Honestly, I thought that I would be alone forever and I had— you know, I had sort of gotten used to that idea and was really settling into, like, my role as everyone's distant gay uncle that no one ever calls before you showed up. So you'll have to forgive me if it's taking me a while to become a person again because your death was not the only awful fucking thing that happened to me this year."

In that moment Quentin hated him. I want to be the worst thing that's ever happened to you, he thought. I deserve that. I deserve to be the thing that hurt you the most. He took a swig of his drink. That he would not be sober anytime soon was a small comfort.

"Losing you was unbearable but you have to, you have to understand. Look." Eliot set his empty glass on the ground and held out his hands over the railing. His palms toward the street. Away from Quentin. They shook and when Eliot rolled his fingers with a wince and twisted his wrist up into a snap there was only smoke where fire once would have been.

"You never said," Quentin said. He felt abashed. Caught out. He had seen the pain but he had hoped Eliot would tell him and he had not hoped it would be like this.

Eliot shrugged and laughed wet like he had drowned. "What can I say. I'm fucking broken."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"When was I supposed to? You were dead, Quentin." And Quentin thought again Yes I know I fucking _know_ I was _there._ "It's not like— if I had come back from, you know, him, would you have poured out every way he'd hurt you to me?"

"That's different." Quentin frowned and clenched his jaw. Remembered when he had gone to the dentist for the first time alone in college at nineteen away from home and the hygienist had told him he had the teeth of a forty-year-old. Flat like a horse.

"Is it?" Eliot's voice cracked. Quentin wanted to scream.

"What happened, Eliot?"

His face then was less easy to read than ever. In all the years he had known him Quentin had never truly found him inscrutable. As much as Eliot had cultivated an air of mystery it had always been to Quentin at most a thin layer like gossamer or even something unromantic like plastic wrap. At best it blurred but did not obscure the sincere center of him. But then in that moment he was opaque. Quentin saw only hurt.

"There was— fuck. I don't." He seemed to steady himself. "When Fillory was ending. I— someone tried to stop me from helping. He broke my hands. Shattered them. They were completely fucked up and then they were fixed but they haven't been the same."

"Okay," Quentin said. Each syllable precise. His skin itched and he dug his heels into the ground to keep from crossing his arms. To not appear— anything. He finished his drink and wanted to chuck his glass onto the street below. Instead he set it on the ground next to Eliot's. An offering. "Okay, well. You don't have to tell me but will you just— let me see." He did not watch Eliot's face instead keeping his eyes on Eliot's hands as he took them.

He had never observed Eliot's hands so closely. In all his years of being desperate for them. Of watching them curl around the stem of a glass or saute onions or lay tiles. Of the feeling of them. On his hips and his face and worst of all in his own hands, how they looked and felt so big until they were in Quentin's own. It was only ever in Quentin's palms that Eliot seemed in any way small.

"Does it hurt?" he asked and squeezed Eliot's knuckles.

"Sort of. I think." Eliot's palms curled like he wanted to pull away and Quentin dug his thumbs into his palms to hold him steady. Not now, you don't get to run away from me now.

With his thumbs in Eliot's lifelines he could feel it. He was sure. The broken pulse of Eliot's elegant magic. Still almost effortless despite its state which when Quentin pushed forward he could feel was— tangled almost. The thing that existed at the heart of Eliot's constructions. A truth like a foundation. The thing upon which he had built himself and it was— less like broken and more like rootbound. Disconnected and connected at the same time. A bad healing. A bad mending.

He thought to push again to ask, Who did this to you. Who fixed you all wrong. He thought better of it. Knew that Eliot wouldn't answer. Instead he reached out with his magic which felt like laying sweaty in silky sheets but which was always against Eliot a coming home. 

First he pushed. Only just. The tendrils of his ever unsure magic. He recalled the way he had once shoved himself against Eliot's and Margo's when such a thing still felt possible— a cooperative spell when they were still allowed to learn things officially, a pyromancy lab that Quentin wasn't technically supposed to be in as a first year but to which Eliot and Margo had dragged him after he had fallen asleep on a couch in the Cottage and woken up the next day to find Margo flicking his forehead and Eliot standing above him with a cigarette asking _Bambi, did we break him?_

But it had been okay. Better, even. To stand hungover between Eliot and Margo in a class too advanced for him but in which he was permitted by virtue of their welcome. Their acceptance. And the feeling then of his nascent magic next to Eliot's and then next to Margo's had been a rush the likes of which he had not experienced since Julia had first helped him up from the gravel when he'd fallen off the monkey bars in the fourth grade and the fear he’d had even at nine years old of being entirely unloveable was suddenly banished beneath her extended hand. 

"I can feel you," Eliot said. Shuddered. Flexed his fingers. "Can you tell what's wrong?"

Quentin frowned. He reached out again like digging into the soil, pushing between the roots of Eliot's easy magic. Eliot like an epiphyte. Thick and oxygen rich. Quentin's magic just as strong and infiltrating if less obvious. If less weather-tested.

"I'm not sure. It feels. Like. You said someone fixed it? It's like they fixed it in a weird way. It doesn't feel right."

Pushing again he tried to find the source of it. The rot. Whatever it was that reached into Eliot's hands and made him hurt. With his eyes closed Quentin could feel he thought the core of it. 

"There," he almost gasped and moved in again like a fishhook beneath Eliot's skin. He wedged between the knots and the grime and pushed again harder this time with his power that he even now he struggled to believe in and felt— it was too big. Whatever had broken Eliot's hands had broken something more fundamental. It was a chasm he could not cross.

"I can't— I can't keep hold of it." He reached out again to try and pull the broken parts of Eliot again together. Like he could reattach Eliot to himself. Tentatively he pushed forward one last time and found himself rejected like a shock. " _Fuck._ "

He opened his eyes and still held to Eliot's hands. 

"It's fine, it doesn't. It doesn't matter." When Eliot spoke his voice was low and seemed disappointed. Quentin wondered if he was doomed to always let Eliot down. If perhaps his death was not in fact the most dramatic way he had done so.

"Shut up. It does. Of course it does." Quentin held onto him as Eliot shook his wrists like throwing off a curse.

"No, Quentin." Eliot pushed him away. "You can't just fix everything."

Quentin withdrew. He stepped away to hold again to the bannister and look out over the skyline and thought of observing a battlefield. The fantasies of his childhood turned to smog. Knights and damsels just half-lit towers with no stars above them. "Fine. What the fuck ever."

"Q."

Stung. Furious. He shook his head and closed his eyes as tightly as he could. His body felt not unlike it had after his father had picked him up from his second inpatient stay. So hot with embarrassment he had not been able to meet Ted's eyes in the same way he could now not meet Eliot's. "No. If I'm not good enough for you just tell me. Please."

"That's not what I'm saying. You know that."

"I just— why the fuck are you with me? If I'm just. Secondhand. If I'm such a piece of shit. If I'm like this," he gestured at the air and then toward his wrecked futile body. At his face which held so little of that to which he once imagined Eliot felt attraction. Toward his stomach that ached with something worse than hunger. "If I can't even fucking help you."

"How do you think I fucking feel, Q? Every goddamn day that you're so miserable and you won't— tell me." Eliot’s eyes were still on the faraway skyline and Quentin thought that he could hear Eliot's throat click as he swallowed something thick. Like stonefruit. Even peach pits contain traces of arsenic. Through gritted teeth Eliot said, "You think I can't see? You think I don't know that you'd rather be dead? You think you're so fucking smart but looking at you is like looking at a bleeding elephant. You're so fucking obvious."

Quentin felt then like Eliot had uncovered him. Like an old fish tank in a widower's house. Full of algae and mostly dead fish that only survived by eating the corpses of their compatriots. Eliot had always done that. Thrown back the curtains to cast light on him. Whether he meant to or not.

When he heard Eliot inhale to speak he knew that his unveiling was not done. Eliot said, "I just. What am _I_ supposed to be? What I am to you? If you won't talk to me, if I can't help you. I'm trying, can't you see that? I'm trying."

The heat of shame all over. Prickling like a fever.

"Do you even want me." It was not a question Quentin realized but a statement. A truth that Eliot had been nurturing in himself these last weeks like a weed.

And Quentin had let him believe it.

At last Quentin turned to speak a flood welling up within him that staunched his anger and he would fix this he knew he would argue and promise to stay alive and promise that he was here and that he _wanted_ but Eliot already held up his shaking hands.

"If I'm so fucking useless. I'm not, I'm not a good partner, I'm, I'm not— _soft_ or pretty like all the girls you like. So why are you here? Why would you," he choked on his tears, "why would you ever want to be with me?"

Stunned and without another option Quentin allowed himself to consider the question. Why would he want to be with this man who at almost thirty gets drunk with such regularity. Who can make me feel so stupid and small. Who broke my heart. 

Because, idiot, another part of Quentin said like an angry child. Because what else would I ever want. Because no one else's heart is as big as yours. Because no one else has ever buried their face in my armpit while they fucked me. Because you make me cinnamon rolls. Because I think that probably it was you that brought me back from the dead.

The realization hit Quentin strangely, somewhere between his jaw and his breastbone like a hard punch or the strike of a tire iron. He considered the dream he'd had when he was dead. The door that was so different from the door through which he had walked through and died, with its wooden crossbeam and its worn edges. He didn't know why he hadn't recognized it before.

If he had walked through the door alone it had only been because someone else had gone ahead to lead him. To clear the path. To lay their love like paving stones across the muddy banks of death. He thought again of Eliot's back.

"Because I love you," Quentin said. It felt simple then. Simpler than it had in the previous several weeks put together. Than the long string of moments which had led him to this one. Like something unspooled or unknotted. "Because I— when I think of the life I want, it's always with you."

Eliot's mouth was open and Quentin could see his bottom teeth and he marveled at the rare sight of them. How when Eliot smiled which was his preferred expression in even the worst of times he showed at most his canines and the gaps behind them. But when he frowned. The difference there in his bowed mouth that even now Quentin wanted to kiss.

"Because," he said again, "just because." Then a feeling like lemon juice in a papercut when his mother had asked him to help with the lemonade for a Memorial Day or maybe Fourth of July picnic when he was small except this time instead of his hands it was his eyes and he wondered what had passed and what was so wrong with him that he needed a metaphor to remind him what tears felt like.

"No, no," Eliot said as he approached and pulled Quentin into his chest. "No, Quentin, no. Please, I'm sorry." Then their faces were close together and Quentin almost could not bear to look at him. His eyelids the only barrier between himself and the hurt he had caused and everything he was which was terrible. I love you, he thought. I love you so fucking much I could choke on it.

Quentin didn't know how much time passed while they stood there together on the balcony. His face pressed firmly against Eliot's chest. Eliot's face in his hair. A messy ouroboros. Tongue waggling and mouth consuming but only in the most tender of world-ending ways. In an effort to calm himself he tried to count his breaths but found that even noticing the movement of his lungs against Eliot's lungs made him feel inadequate in a way he imagined the first vertebrates emerging from the sea might feel if they were to crawl onto the shore now and find themselves at the foot of a NASA launchpad.

"I don't know how to fix this," he finally said. Muffled against the wet of Eliot's shirt. "This thing in me that's broken. That won't just like. Be happy to be alive. Because I _am_. I see you in the morning and even when I'm hungover and feel like overeasy death— sorry— I see you and I'm so glad. I really am."

"You promise?" Eliot said and his voice cracked and Quentin couldn't help it. He laughed. To hear Eliot's voice so earnest like Quentin had simply said he would empty the dishwasher.

"Yeah," he said and kissed the bolt of Eliot's jaw. "I promise. I love you so fucking much. I'm sorry I'm an idiot. I don't. I really don't know what's wrong with me but I am trying and just. Having you here. It means. Everything."

Eliot nodded and his chin bumped against Quentin's head. "I'm sorry everything is so fucking hard. But I meant when I said— do you remember? The first night you were back. That we'll get through it."

"I think that was me," Quentin said and laughed and Eliot laughed like he understood and Quentin felt it then, his understanding, pulled away so that he could kiss Eliot's bearded cheek. It felt so different from the Eliot he knew and was yet the most— familiar thing. In his memory he had rubbed his face against this bearded and increasingly lined face over years and years and it had only become moreso. He remembered suddenly the feeling of his own thick beard and Eliot's clean shaven face when they must have been, what, seventy? Eighty? They had said fifty years and yet it occurred to Quentin that they might have rounded for the sake of a clear narrative to share. But he thought that Teddy had come back that last time and his youngest child was almost sixteen. So Quentin must have been at least seventy-nine or eighty. And Eliot had died a year or two later which meant they'd had closer to sixty years than fifty and the arithmetic made him dizzy and he could only kiss under Eliot's ear to soothe himself. To hope that they had that long in front of them now.

And the strangeness of realizing he did want it. That as much as he wanted to be dead he wanted to see his thirtieth and fortieth and fiftieth birthday and to see Eliot's crows feet grow against his vanity and to watch those gorgeous grey streaks emerge in his curls which themselves would never change.

The question was then which was stronger. To keep on living and learn to love the skin which would thin on the backs of Eliot's hands and at his elbows. Or to die.

Or to die.

Quentin said, "I really love you, you know."

"Yeah," Eliot said, "I know."

"I'm sorry. I want to just like. List all the ways in which I suck to make myself feel better I guess? So you'll know that I know that I'm the fucking worst. But I know that's maybe not— great of me."

"It's really not." Eliot kissed his cheek and pushed his fingers through his hair and Quentin felt grateful. "For what it's worth I. I feel like a real piece of shit a lot of the time. But maybe let's go to bed? I just want to hold you." He kissed Quentin's crown and held on more tightly.

"Yeah. Okay." Quentin stood on his toes and pulled Eliot in for a kiss. He did not feel as if the matter were resolved but he could not see anymore the ache of it. Too exhausted and too drunk. Attempting to recall what had led them here he now found that he could not. Behind him only a trail of crumbs that disappeared past the balcony door.

He really ought to drink less.

The routines of nighttime felt normal even now. To splash water on his face and use the toner he had agreed at Eliot's behest to make a routine of. To lean his head against Eliot's shoulder as he brushed the alcohol from his teeth and remembered weakly that they had left their glasses outside.

To crawl into bed. To lay on his side and pull Eliot's face against his chest the way he himself liked to be held. He did his best not to move until he was reasonably sure Eliot was asleep. Then he rolled onto his back to look at the high ceiling and the helicopter whirring of the fan, catching his focus on a blade long enough to watch it make a full circle against the dim blue-white of the drywall.

Sleep was slow to come for Quentin. Despite his drunkenness which usually might have knocked him out he found that he could not rest. Struck by a sudden loneliness that reminded him that as an only child he was something of a strange beast. A sort of absence inherent in him in what it was to share none of his own experiences. He laid awake for some time wondering if growing up without a brother or a sister had cordoned him off from other people in a way he would never truly be able to undo. If perhaps his circumstances had dug a moat around him and made him inaccessible. Incapable of escaping himself.

He dismissed it as his own stupid drunk brain. This tired bullshit. The thing that dug a useless pit in him that would likely or at least hopefully be gone tomorrow with three or four ibuprofen and something greasy for breakfast. In his lonely drunkenness he wished he were not so drunk. That neither of them were. That they had had more time to sort out what had happened or that it had not happened at all.

He tried to remember if there had ever been a time when Eliot's addiction was less than that. If that boy he had met at almost-twenty-four had recently been twenty-one and if maybe that boy had been eighteen once, free for the first time not just to pilfer sips from his father's closely monitored liquor cabinet. If that too-young boy had been tall enough and confident enough and in possession of enough nascent magic to procure his own whiskey and champagne. He wondered if there had been a tipping point. A moment in which it had gone from partying too hard to something else. It made Quentin's heart ache. The white knight that still lived in him heedless of all he had learned and which had not been banished even in his own death in that moment unsheathed its sword and stepped forward prepared as if for battle. As if it could step between Eliot and that first time he came home to find his suitemate doing lines off the built in desk and gamely sat down beside him.

There must have been a moment. There is always a moment.

Such thoughts inevitably led to Quentin, on his side, his hand heavy on Eliot's chest as he tried to recall the boy who had once waved to him from across the yard of the cottage; the boy who still wore too-short shorts and designer sunglasses and kept his hair artfully tousled, who kept everyone at arm's length but had welcomed Quentin in without hesitation. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine Eliot as he was then: bright and young and full of a future that neither of them had yet gotten to live. Would never get to live. If he recalled the image with enough fondness, he could remember the way that Eliot's tongue had slipped on his name, the slur of the N into the soft T. How Margo had giggled beside him. The bloody Marys they both held.

What would have happened if he'd walked across the lawn that day and into Eliot's arms, like half of him had wanted? To imagine a year in which he flanked Eliot's side at every party, to imagine a hundred more mornings waking up next to Eliot in bed was a strange indulgence. Maybe they would've stayed in Fillory together, two kings on their thrones with Margo and Alice beside them. Maybe everything would've been different.

There is always a moment.

Still it— it wasn't fair, he knew, to long for that boy so badly. He was as dead as the Quentin who had stumbled through the bushes. As the one who had kissed Eliot on top of a quilt and as dead as the one who had buried him in it.

It occurred to Quentin with the profound clarity of four a.m. that he perhaps had no reason to be as broken as he felt. He thought that if Eliot was made hurt then probably he was simply born damaged. 

Don't be an idiot, he said to himself. Quentin pushed his face into the bony crest of Eliot's shoulder and slept.

Later he was not sure if he dreamt but he thought he might have done. The strange half waking sleeping state of the deeply drunk and preemptively hungover. Around seven a.m. he woke briefly with a deep pang in his stomach like hunger and he wanted. Bread. Definitely bread.

He crawled from the bed and ignored Quasar's equally angry howls as he scrounged from the fridge a piece of old pita and unopened hummus and gratefully scooped and shoved it into his mouth. It made him thirsty and he was grateful also for the thirst that was not just his own dehydration but also the need generated by chickpeas and sesame and some misplaced sense of survival. 

Once back in bed he snuggled mostly content against Eliot's back. He felt at least sated. The thin sweat over Eliot's skin was a comfort against his nose and he fell again asleep with his hand cradling the slight finely furred curve of Eliot's belly.

He awoke again before Eliot. His phone said 10:52. Late but not too late. He rose and brushed his teeth and washed his night guard with Listerine and went to the kitchen. He wanted to wait to eat until Eliot was awake and so he did a loop around the kitchen, then another, until he came to rest at the stove which he noticed bore some grease stains and bits of burned onion. So he set himself to that, the cleaning, the rubber gloves to prevent the burn of Bar Keepers Friend and marveled again how anything could withstand so many applications of abrasive chemicals and felt— oddly kin to a piece of stainless steel. In his sober state it made him smile to think of himself as so easily cleansed. Relatively speaking.

Yet he felt a sort of sadness. In his hangover. And also a shame. At his behavior the night before. Recalling the time he had gone to an all-boy's sleepover for Tommy Gonzales' eighth birthday and had gone to the bathroom to cry because he felt so alone and eventually Tommy's mom had come in asked if Quentin wanted her to call his dad and he had nodded and avoided Tommy for the rest of the year. He sat at the island and scrolled through his phone until at last Eliot emerged.

"Hey," he said when Eliot kissed his temple. The embarrassment beneath which he tried so hard to hide.

"Hey. Eggs? Or do you want something sweet?"

Quentin shrugged. Determined in his amenability. "Whatever you want." He smiled. Watched as Eliot walked to the fridge and got out the eggs and left them on the counter before he put a pan on the stove and held the burner to click until it lit. He stared for a moment then at the surface and turned to smile earnestly at Quentin in a way that the previous night would have set his teeth on edge. Instead he felt. Pleased. Yet like he oughtn't. 

Eliot said, "Thank you for cleaning."

Quentin nodded. "No problem."

From there breakfast and the afternoon were simple if not easy. They didn’t speak much which Quentin thought was for the best. He wondered if peace could not be built on words but only on silence. Certainly that would explain so much, given— his inability to keep quiet for most of his life. So he kept to himself. Eliot busied himself changing the cat litter and at one point diverted to cleaning the bathroom while Quentin too exhausted and too ashamed laid on the couch reading page 45 of _The Lathe of Heaven_ for half an hour. The same page he had been stuck on for a week. 

It was a perverse joy to wallow in his hangover both emotional and alcoholic. To feel like he was allowed for once to be as tired as he was or that he could at least point to something that was not simply his own brain as the source. With not a little pleasure he allowed his mind to wander through his inadequacies as if strolling through the park. Looking into ponds and puddles to see the reflections of his worst selves. He reread a sentence and again and eventually gave up, curling up on his side to devote himself completely to his wallowing until he gave himself over to the lucid half-sleep of daytime.

He dreamt that Eliot was gone. In the dream he did not know if Eliot was dead or possessed or something else but he was gone, gone and Quentin couldn't help but wonder if he had made a choice to leave. If he had decided that Quentin wasn't what he wanted. He was alone and he was empty and it was all his fault. 

In the dream he searched first the cottage. Margo's bedroom, then Eliot's own. His heart hurt at the brightly colored paint. The brass beds and the vanities littered with photos and jewelry. The smell of Nag Champa and old wood almost detectable but doing nothing for Quentin's mounting panic. When he could not find Eliot in the reading nook or in the kitchen he found himself suddenly in Whitespire. There he checked the throne room and what he thought was Eliot's room or but might have been Fen's or else had passed between them like an old shirt. Their shared quarters never quite those of cohabitation. Even in his dream it made Quentin feel sick with sadness for them both.

The strangest part was that he did not speak. He was only looking. He didn't call out. Merely checked behind tapestries and under beds like he had done until Teddy was almost eight years old. Checking for monsters. Checking for Eliot.

Then: the warmth of late afternoon sunlight across his face. The cold sweat of sleep. He awoke and his mouth was dry and he was alone but it had only been a dream.

"El?" he called into the wide open living room. The aching need deep in his gut to be cared for. To find Eliot and simply sit beside him. He called out again and heard nothing and thought, Well, I suppose I deserve this. The dreaming irrational panic that Eliot had up and left him in the middle of the day without saying anything. "Eliot?" he tried one last time. A few seconds passed before at last he heard Eliot's voice from upstairs.

"Up here." His voice that thing which when he heard it settled something in his bones. Too relieved Quentin took the stairs two at a time albeit with a sort of soft-footed silence which would not betray his eagerness. He missed Eliot. Even when they had been in the same house all afternoon. He wondered if maybe that wasn't love.

When Quentin found him he was sitting on the floor with his back toward the door in an upstairs bedroom where the light came in saffron-tinged. Quasar laid splayed in sunbeam.

Quentin stood there for a moment in the doorway just— watching. The slight movements of his shoulders as he seemed to flip through papers. His concentration. The planes of light across his neck. Sometimes he wasn't sure if it was real memory or his own romanticization of quotidian existence but he thought that Eliot looked especially beautiful like this. Unselfconscious. 

When he approached he saw that in front of Eliot was a plastic filing bin that looked straight out of an OfficeMax catalog.

"What's up?"

Eliot shifted to allow Quentin equal view to what laid in front of him. File folders and beside them scattered papers. Shapes like kindergarten all triangles and hexagons in smudged Rose Art color. Faces faded in 1990s Kodak disposable hues.

"Feeling, I don't know, nostalgic today I guess."

"How so?"

Eliot shrugged. "It's like— you know, a weird byproduct of not having parents is you save a lot of the stupid shit that maybe they would've. Like report cards. I still have this collage I made in the second grade?" He held up a piece of laminated sky blue construction paper with the words ELIOT WAUGH arced across the top in bubble letters. In the center was a Sears family portrait that was in every way perfected such that it looked like a photo from a catalog. Eliot's father with the same dark hair but cropped short and same large nose in the center of his face. His mother with her hair lighter and curled into high heaven. The white of her mock turtleneck stark against her red sweater and her dimpled chin that when Quentin noticed almost made him want to cry. On either side of them two lanky boys that at seven or nine in their poorly-fitted button downs looked destined for farmwork and nuclear families. In front of them a smaller child and then, in Annie's lap. An infant that could only be Eliot. His hair wild and blonde and a huge smile across his chubby face.

Surrounding this photo was what seemed to be a shrine to seven-year-old Eliot. Glitter glue stars in each corner. Magazine cutouts of paintbrushes and colored pencils and _For fun I like to do_ … written in an adult's hand followed by ART! in clumsy children's letters. _When I grow up I want to be_ … A SINGER! _My favorite color is_ … GREEN!

Eliot laughed as he put it away. Quentin resisted the urge to reach out and take it back. As if he might keep a piece of Eliot better than Eliot had kept himself. Better than anyone else had kept the Eliot in the photos. "I don't know why I don't get rid of it. I don't know why I took it with me. But it's in this one box." He gestured at the bin in front of him. "With my birth certificate and my social security card and for some reason a few photos of me and my cousins. With the AP and SAT score reports I thought I might need. They're mine to carry." 

Before Quentin's father had died, he could not have understood what Eliot meant. But now, at almost twenty-eight, which was, God— almost thirty, he began to understand. What he had not fully grasped of what must have been Eliot's perennial loneliness. Of having no home to return to. What it meant to carry the artifacts of your childhood around like talismans. Relics for which no pilgrims would come.

The single plane that gathered dust on a bookshelf downstairs.

"I get that," Quentin said gently. He hoped he did. "Do you ever miss them? Your family I mean." 

Eliot shook his head. "Not really. But I've always wanted a family. Not kids— well, maybe, I don't know. But, you know. Whether I've realized it or not I have been— I've wanted some sort of family of my own so badly. You know? Like. I went through college without ever once getting a nagging phone call about when I was coming home for Thanksgiving. I never _went home_ for Thanksgiving." He sighed and rubbed at one eye. "So in that way I guess I miss them. For what they wouldn't give me. For what they couldn’t."

Quentin chewed his lip. He was not sure it was the right thing to say but it seemed like the only thing that could come next.

"Well. Margo's your family. I— I'm your family."

"Yeah," Eliot said. He smiled then and pulled him in for a kiss. It was only sweet despite the hand around the back of his neck and Quentin still found his breath coming short. The feeling of the soft inner skin of Eliot's lips. The warmth and the wet. When Eliot pulled away he was dazed with it. "You are," Eliot said, seriously, as if confirming Quentin's assertion. For his part Quentin tried to steady his breathing and feel like something more closely resembling a person instead of what he felt which was just a quivering column of need. He held tightly to Eliot's hand and tried to be an anchor. 

"So's Margo," Quentin insisted again. He did not want Eliot to let go of her. He doubted it was possible at the same time that it terrified him. Eliot didn't deserve another loss. And Margo wherever she was couldn't possibly think herself lost to him.

"I just don't know how to find her," Eliot said. His voice miserable, defeated. Quentin noticed then the tear tracks on his cheeks. "She doesn't just feel lost but she doesn't feel dead and it's— it's so hard to explain. I still can't tell if I pushed her away or if she pulled back all on her own and I miss her so bad, Q. I miss her. And you know, I'm, I'm just so aware that everyone will die. Not just because of you but because of— what my life has been. I look at Quasar," and here he pulled the cat toward him despite his protestations, which made something in Quentin go molten and aching and he smiled in spite of the tears on Eliot's face. In spite of the salt and the heat. "For all I know I'll have ten or fifteen years with him if I'm lucky, but I always know that it's limited. That one day I'll be without. Without Margo, without you. And frankly I got, fucking lucky, that I died first, last time. But I feel like I'm grieving Margo and I've already grieved you once and I can't do it again. So please just— I know it's hard but I. I love you and I want you to live. I don't care if I have to guilt you. I'm not even sure I care if you hate me for it. You're my family. I want you to live."

"I'm trying," Quentin said. Holding Eliot's gaze so he would know he meant it. "I'm trying."

"And I'm so," Eliot looked down then. His face hard and his shoulders set. He did not look up when he said, "I'm ashamed. All the time. Of myself. Of the decisions I've made. To have become— whatever it is that I am. That I was. Whatever it was in me that pushed Margo away. That made me run away from you."

Maybe you should be ashamed, Quentin thought. Maybe we all should be. Out loud he said, "So am I." It didn't even feel like an admission. It felt obvious. As if there was anything else he should have felt after the night before.

"No, listen— I have learned enough about myself in the last few years to know there is something in me worth loving. But I don't. I don't like how I am. What I do."

"We've all done a lot to survive," Quentin said without thinking. Eliot looked at him curiously and his smile Quentin thought was so sad.

He said, "But I want to be more than that. Better than that. Don't you?"

Quentin did. He did not want to say it but. He did. The light thing in him that was furious to escape. The thing that Eliot saw and that Quentin wanted to be. Good enough. Open enough. That wanted to stop drinking so much and wanted Eliot to stop drinking so much and wanted to sit and do the crossword together on the balcony and only in ink. To have of all things conviction. And not the conviction of his youth that had led him here but the conviction of someone older and someone better who understood and believed in his own capacity for change. Who could commit to it.

He shook his head as if to clear it and leaned against Eliot. Took his hand.

"Did I ever tell you about the summer my dad was hospitalized?"

"Like when he had cancer?"

"No, before that. After the divorce. I was fifteen, I think?"

Eliot looked at him and he pursed his lips and Quentin thought, God you're beautiful. "No, I don't think you did."

"Well it was," Quentin began and cast his mind back to that summer and it must have been toward the end. After his birthday. He had been watching national news in a debate class-fueled attempt to become an informed citizen and also maybe to impress Julia with his opinion of the troop surge in Iraq. On the prosecutable offenses of George W. Bush. But what he remembered most was that a bridge had collapsed in Minnesota that day and that although it had seemed very far away from New Jersey he had a friend from a Fillory LiveJournal group with whom he'd gone so far as to exchange actual letters that lived in Minneapolis. So he had run upstairs to the computer room because Ted would still not let him have his own and sat in the chair and jiggled his leg while the desktop that still ran Windows XP despite vague promises to upgrade soon slowly booted up until at last he was able to send her a message and that was where he was when downstairs Ted collapsed in the kitchen.

He took a deep breath. "I didn't know it obviously, he was pretty good about keeping adult stuff away from me. But he had been drinking a lot after the divorce. In retrospect I know he was in a lot of pain and he wasn't exactly somebody who talked about it. And I think I remember him being around less that year, but it's hard to say, I was a kid, you know? But that's also the thing, men like my dad are good at being drunk because they never say anything anyway. So, you know, it wasn't until he started puking and wouldn't stop and we went to the ER— well, he did, I stayed with Julia, my mom was like, in Tahoe or something— but it wasn't until then that even he knew how bad it was. It was just mild pancreatitis. But it was bad enough that he was in the hospital for a few days, and he stopped drinking for a long time after that."

He remembered: the fear that his father would not come home. The excitement of Cinnamon Toast Crunch that Julia's family bought and which Ted had proclaimed both too expensive and too high in sugar. The thrill of staying up late each night and realizing only later that her mother had indulged them. How exhausted his father had looked that first night home and the dim silence that fell over the house even as they sat next to one another on the couch watching Project Runway as they had not done in several months. Not since his father had retreated inwardly in a way that Quentin now recognized in himself in the same way that you might identify a famous actor in their early role in a police procedural.

Now: the feeling of Eliot's fingers on his arm. The quiet of the apartment. The foreign heat of tears on his face.

"He got better, then I got sick. And I don't know how but he kept it together for me. And I keep thinking, if I can just pull it together enough to take care of you, then maybe I'll feel better. Maybe being alive won't feel like such a fucking chore because it still does and I hate it, I hate that I'm not more grateful. Because I don't want to be dead but I don't know how to fix everything broken in me that killed me in the first place."

And that was the thing, wasn't it. Whatever it was that lived in him that felt like shattered terra cotta or glass. Something sharp and too brittle for its purpose. Something that in another life would be simple to glue back together with time and care and the right skills. None of which seemed obtainable in the present circumstances.

He said, "I think. I'm sorry I've been so shitty. I feel like. I don't know. Like I'm just doing a terrible job of taking care of you and failing you and just. Fuck, Eliot. I'm so sorry. I just wanna dig myself out of this bullshit but it feels like— fucking quicksand. And I keep drinking even though I wish you would stop and I don't know how to make any of this work and it shouldn't be— it just, I just feel like it shouldn't be this hard but it is and I'm sorry. God. I'm so sorry."

Eliot nodded or that's what Quentin thought he did from the motion in his periphery. He squeezed Quentin's arm. He kissed his temple. For a few heartbeats he stayed there with his lips against Quentin's hairline.

Finally he said, "Do you want to give me a haircut?"

Quentin laughed in a way he thought must have sounded like a goose. Abrupt and honking. "What?"

"Have you seen me lately, Q? This is not a good look."

"I dunno," Quentin shrugged, "I was kinda getting into it." He reached forward to run his fingers through the short hair that did not reach to fit into the bun Eliot had taken to wearing on days he didn't wash his hair.

"See, exactly, you shouldn't be _getting into it._ I should be rakishly sexy at all times. Without any caveats. I am not a gradual experience, you know this."

Quentin sighed dramatically. This was familiar and gentle and good. This back and forth. The lilt in Eliot's tone. He smiled.

"Sure. I gotta look up instructions first, though."

"You do that. I'll get us something to eat."

— 

Now in the bathroom, in the bright light of the setting sun. Eliot sat on a stool stolen from the kitchen, casually slouched in a v-neck and boxer briefs in an image that Quentin treasured. Equally because it was simply Eliot, alive, but also because it was Eliot, unarmored. All soft underbelly in grey and black cotton that hugged his still too-skinny shoulders and hips and revealed enough chest hair that Quentin felt almost stupid with attraction. 

"You sure you trust me to do this?" Quentin said. He busied himself arranging the clippers, combs, and scissors on a towel. 

"Please, I look like a Grateful Dead roadie." Eliot's hand squeezing his hip.

"And here I thought you were shooting for _Rumours_ -era Lindsey Buckingham."

At this, Eliot laughed. Quentin felt something small and warm bloom in his chest. Even after all this time, he felt as pleased as he had the first time Eliot had looked at him and smiled and said, _Oh, so he does have a sense of humor_ , that third night at Brakebills when he'd walked into Eliot's room to complain about some poorly structured syllabus or else to borrow an astrolabe and instead of leaving, had been compelled by some unseen force to sit on the foot of Eliot's bed and ask, _So are you like, cosplaying Jeeves and Wooster?_ as he touched the vest that Eliot had laid out for the night to come.

Quentin settled with hands on the counter and surveyed the tools one last time. "Okay. And you're sure you don't want me to use the spell?"

"No, it doesn't work as well for curly hair. Can't be trusted."

"All right, well. I'm not liable for the results."

"Noted," Eliot said with a smile. He craned his neck up for a kiss. Quentin obliged, reaching forward to hold the back of Eliot's head. He gave the long hair there a brief goodbye tug. The kiss was short and sweet and seemed far too simple for the delicate peace that existed between them like the thin ice in November.

Eliot groaned a little when Quentin rubbed his fingers firmly against his scalp. "God, I love haircuts," he sighed. A sympathetic shiver of pleasure ran down Quentin's spine. The joy of making Eliot feel good.

"Yeah? What's your favorite part?" Quentin asked, knowing, knowing, always knowing, that Eliot loved his broad fingertips and the way they pushed into Eliot's scalp and down his neck. His nails that were just long enough to scratch through his hairline and sideburns. Quentin always hated his own hands. They felt so miserably inartistic. Too square. No good for any instruments, produced illegible handwriting, cast clumsy spells and could hardly sometimes muster the motion to brush his teeth. But Eliot, Eliot—

Eliot said, "I love your hands." Quentin bowed to kiss the tip of his nose with its romantic bump and its mole that Quentin loved.

"All right, hand me one of those?"

Eliot hummed softly and handed him a long plastic hair clip. Quentin did his best to follow the YouTube instructions he'd watched four times. Maybe five. He'd gone back to rewatch the part on sectioning. There had been some debate about whether or not curly hair should be wet and Quentin had decided in the end that dampening it made the most sense, for Eliot's, God— his dark hair, thick and so different from Quentin's own. The color and the curl that Quentin had thought of terribly often when he was— when he was dead. 

It was still so strange to consider that he had been dead at all. What it had felt like to miss Eliot. To miss everyone. To be in a place that was supposed to be the end but that instead felt so much like the in between. A thing that made him want to believe in purgatory except he knew that nothing lay beyond it.

There had been a while— a few days or months or. Some amount of time. It was hard to tell. Sleeping was different there. It was like a purgatory, not quite sleeping, not quite awake, his essence simply keeping up the routines he had struggled to maintain in life. He had wondered if he'd ever grow out of it. If perhaps once he were dead long enough the urge would cease to find him.

But there had been a while. When he'd thought that he was truly better off. It must've been when he first arrived. When he'd bullied himself into believing that he had made the right decision. Eliot was safe because of him. Alice was safe because of him. The whole world. The universe, maybe, was safe because of him. And for a while, that had been enough.

But he had missed them. He missed how Eliot had for a while spent hazy afternoons in the cottage with his head in Quentin's lap demanding scalp massages. The particular intimacy of him. He had missed Julia and recalled the scent of her organic detergent and natural deodorant that only sometimes worked and wondered each day if she had found her way back to magic. He missed Alice and all that had been left unsaid. Those frayed edges and loose threads that Quentin had felt so close to hemming. He had missed Margo, and longed desperately to get wine drunk with her on a Tuesday and watch all twelve hours of the extended editions of Lord of the Rings, shouting the lines of the characters they had divvied up without discussion sometime in the space between autumn of first year and every quest that followed— Margo, always Aragorn and Gandalf; Quentin, always Pippin and Legolas.

"Q?" Eliot said softly. "You okay?"

Eliot's hair slipped between his fingers as he drew it up. Carefully, he pulled upward, laying Eliot's hair as flat as he could to draw the part.

"I'm okay," he said. _I'm okay_.

He went about his work with great care, trimming the ends between the unsteady ends of his own fingertips. He moved backwards to forwards ensuring that Eliot would not be left with a mullet or worse. The skin of Eliot's neck was freckled and Quentin felt sympathetic pleasure when Eliot shivered.

"I always loved that," Quentin said.

"What?"

"This." Having said so Quentin paused his work to drag his fingers behind Eliot's ears and down his neck. When Eliot shuddered and leaned back and he could not resist then the urge to lean down and kiss him. There, on the spot on the back of his neck where soon he would with clippers shave. Where right now the hair was still long but too fine for his maladroit fingers. When Eliot shivered again he smiled.

"Yeah," Eliot said. "It's nice."

With his fingers still against the fine skin of Eliot’s neck Quentin steeled himself. There would never be he thought a right time. The right moment. But if there was one he thought that here with the both of them calm and the both of them sober and when he could touch Eliot with care— that was it. "I— I meant what I said. Earlier," he tried.

Eliot looked up from beneath his eyelashes. Met Quentin’s gaze in the mirror and nodded, a silent _Continue_. "I mean, about drinking less. I keep making an idiot of myself and I feel like shit all the time and I think it would be good to at least, like. You know. Cool it," he finished lamely and paused to assess what he had said. Kept drawing his fingers through Eliot's damp hair to trim the ends even as he didn't cut. His heart beat hard and his hands shook. He had not realized how terrified he had been to say anything. To reveal anything.

"Q," Eliot said. His voice was not angry and he did not sound resistant. But he sounded— hurt, maybe. Quentin saw then that a flush spread over the back of his neck and realized that the strange deep tone to his voice was embarrassment. Shame. "Do you think I'm an alcoholic?" 

Quentin shrugged. He set the scissors down to shake out his hands and take a deep breath. Settled his hands on Eliot's shoulders and faced him in the mirror. "I don't know. I don't know if I've ever bought into those sorts of labels or like— you know, the whole— person-first language thing, I think, is my preference. Because I don't want you to define yourself by addiction. I don't think it's a helpful way to think about things. Like— I mean, I get why some people find that helpful, or whatever, but I just. I think the label has helped you avoid facing the problem because you know, your dad was an alcoholic, right? And you're not like him." Quentin squeezed Eliot's shoulder. "I promise you're not like him. But— I do think you have an unhealthy relationship with alcohol. And I don't know what the answer is and I'm not trying to stage an intervention or whatever I just— I know that I haven't been helping and I want to help. So if I can say, let's not drink tonight, and that helps, then that's what I want to do."

When he was done Quentin inhaled a thin breath and minutely Eliot nodded. He brought his hand to rest on top of Quentin's as if they each performed a laying on of hands. Quentin on Eliot and Eliot on Quentin. "Yeah," he said, "okay. I'm sorry for— well. Everything. I don't want you to feel like you have to take care of me. Not like this, anyway."

"I want to," Quentin said, too quickly. "I mean— it's okay. You're not hard to take care of. You're not hard to love." What Quentin had said the night before came rushing back to him in a wave like nausea. How cruel he had been. Like everything else it felt far away and like it had been another person but the clear truth was that it had not been anyone else. It had been Quentin. Just like it had been Quentin who had accused Julia of willfully leading him on. How it had been Quentin who had so doggedly insisted he knew Alice better than she knew herself.

But he had grown once. And again. He could keep growing. If he chose to. "I'm sorry I said you were," he said quietly. He kissed Eliot's cheek.

Eliot sighed. He wiped at his cheek and Quentin allowed them both to proceed under the illusion that he was only brushing away loose hair. He said, "I think we're all hard to love sometimes, sweetheart. It's okay. We were fucked up. Let's just— not get fucked up tonight." He handed Quentin the scissors and smiled weakly at their reflections. "Finish up, okay?"

Quentin nodded. He accepted the scissors and continued his work without urgency. Tried to feel settled in their agreement. In their understanding. He trimmed and he observed and he measured the lengths of the ends against one another. When he was done with the scissors he picked up the clippers and as carefully as he could drew a not-quite-straight line across the back of Eliot's neck. Curved gently behind his ears. He ran his thumb over the skin to check for remaining stubble and missed hairs and just to touch. The warmth of him. The softness. He could not resist then to stoop to kiss him there. The clippers still buzzing in his hand.

Eliot turned his head to meet him. His lips soft like always. Warm and alive— _alive_. As if waiting for Quentin's approval Eliot did not deepen the kiss and this time his gentleness did not stir something stinging in Quentin. Instead he felt— he didn't know. Something sweet but not too sweet. Like ripe fruit. Giving. 

He recalled then his fortieth birthday. Teddy had been ten, the age at which parental birthdays were equally shared with children. When his preferences were taken into equal account. So when Teddy demanded blackberries Quentin had made a blackberry cobbler and Eliot had traded cantrips for cream in the village and found something resembling vanilla and had used what Quentin even then still thought of as Margo's cryomancy to churn them ice cream. They had shared it all on the banks of the creek and Teddy ate most of the ice cream and Quentin had thought This is how it's supposed to be. My son is supposed to eat all of the sweets. It was the most adult he had yet felt.

But what Quentin remembered most of all was after Teddy was asleep in the cabin. How on the mosaic Eliot had pulled out a bottle of wine he had at last expertly fermented ( _Wild yeast, Quentin_ ) and fed Quentin what remained of the blackberries by hand. Unthinking. Simply sat beside Quentin while they drank his wild wine and placed the fruit on his tongue. He remembered how his lips and later Eliot's were stained with it. And how in love he had felt. How glad to share his life.

Suddenly he felt that pang again as he had in the underworld. It was not an exaggeration he thought to call it cosmic. Something molten and shifting. He wondered if it had been a beacon to whatever it was in Eliot that had found him and brought him home. And then he realized he hadn't told Eliot of his revelation.

"So don't— get upset about this," Quentin said as he maneuvered to stand in front of Eliot. He stood up straight. Switched the clippers off. He bit his lip and tried to remember what blackberries tasted like.

"Not a great lead in, Q."

"Sorry, I just. This is going to sound insane."

"Okay," Eliot said and his brow furrowed in confusion or maybe concern. "Well, we're on a roll with the whole vulnerability thing, so."

Quentin laughed a little manically and steadied himself. Gathered his words and checked them like phone, wallet, keys. "I think. I don't know how to explain it. But I think something in you found me and brought me back. I can't explain how but I— I know it. It was you, Eliot."

"My magic is quite literally broken. I don't think I could've done that."

"That's just your hands. Like, just the conduit. Whatever this was. This was you. I know it was. I know it."

Eliot looked down at his hands then. He observed them like ley lines. Old coincidences that could not be explained but in which power undoubtedly coursed.

"I know it sounds fucking crazy but— you're just. You knew me. After everything you knew me best and you must have wanted me the most or else like, I don't know. You fought for me. Somehow. When I think back on how it felt it was like something— I thought it was just my shitty depressed brain so I thought I was just fighting with myself but it was you. It was you. I know it. Like, okay, maybe— maybe whatever broke your hands set a part of you loose and it left to find me. And I'm not— listen. We'll fix your hands and you'll be— yourself again. We'll find Margo and Alice and everyone and we'll fix them I know we will but I think. Something happened. And when your shade or your essence was at its most broken it sought me out. It found me. I know it. I can feel it." He tapped his chest with the palm of his hand as he had once done with much more force in the midst of panic attacks and which now after years of therapy and multiple hospitalizations served as some sort of deranged self-soothing mechanism. Once was lost and now I'm found. He took a deep breath. "And I'm not— I'm not saying everything happens for a reason because I know that's bullshit and I know you know that's bullshit but I am saying that maybe in some way we got some sort of horrible fucked up lucky. Because you were hurt and you _found me_." 

When he was done Quentin practically panted with the effort of his explanation and though he was not convinced he had made much sense he still felt as though he had said everything he could have said. As though he had laid out like a map a route to the truth of his resurrection but that he might have done so in a strange language. One he had spoken for decades in another world and which he hoped that Eliot still might understand.

"Quentin," Eliot said seriously.

"Yeah." When he looked down he saw Eliot's eyes wide and curious. 

"Are you saying— are you saying that true love saved the day?"

Quentin stared at Eliot and Eliot stared at Quentin as if each thought the other was joking. Their postures tense like waiting for a feint. 

"I mean, yeah, I guess I am," Quentin said. He couldn't tell if his body was trying to laugh or to cry but when his chest finally shook it revealed itself the former. And when his face was wet he realized he was crying too and Eliot was pulling him down to straddle his hips.

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Eliot said into his mouth and kissed him. 

Quentin gave himself over. Let himself feel the warm slide of Eliot's lips and of his hand against the back of his neck. For the first time in recent memory the feeling did not make him want to run away. Underneath his skin he felt his muscles going pliant instead of seizing and he felt a relief like the first time he had jumped into the deep end and found that he could swim after all.

He smiled against Eliot's mouth. "I've said stupider things."

"I'm not so sure," Eliot said and pushed forward to lick into Quentin's mouth. Quentin reached forward in reciprocation. To cup Eliot's face. To feel the newly shorn hair at the back of his neck. Eliot's kisses as they always had been: demanding but only for what Quentin could give. For what he had and what he hid or at least what was buried.

He kissed his way down Eliot's neck. The tendons there. The skin tickling under his lips with hair cut loose that Quentin waved away with a casual magic he did not often possess. He stopped to worship the sharp points of Eliot's clavicles and dip his tongue beneath the vee of his shirt. Gratified by Eliot's moan or laugh, whichever it was, he didn't care. The joy of what it was to be here in a bright white bathroom in an apartment that rivaled even his most hungover of HGTV fantasies and to feel anything in the shape of desire was more than he could've asked for even a day ago. Sliding his hands down Eliot's sides until he could dig his thumbs into the muscle that crested over his hips.

Eliot rocked upward and Quentin registered then that he was hard. The long and thick shape of him beneath Quentin's ass that made him gasp as Eliot pressed against him.

"Sorry, sorry," Eliot breathed. He stilled his body and instead of shame or anger Quentin felt only need. He grabbed for Eliot's hand and pressed against his own erection.

"No, don't apologize," he said and then hissed when Eliot laughed and squeezed the head of it through his jeans. He pushed his hips down against Eliot who in only his underwear was far more vulnerable and smiled in satisfaction when he groaned. "See, it's okay." A mock consolation as he kissed Eliot's brow.

"You're terrible."

"I'm the worst," Quentin agreed, and slid down to insinuate himself between Eliot's legs. He spared a moment to kiss his hairy knees and the barely furred skin of his thighs before he mouthed inward. Left a trail of wet kisses behind.

Quentin nosed at the soft fabric and his mouth watered at the shape of Eliot's dick underneath. There was always something so— _intimate_ did not seem sufficient. It couldn't describe the heat and the weight underneath Quentin's mouth or his want of it, the drag of cotton that caught slightly on his chapped lips. It was so soft against his face, the material reality of it entirely unlike any of his dreams or his deathbound longings. The beat of Eliot's blood, of his heart underneath the fabric and deeper, the skin, the tissue. He wanted it in his hand, his mouth. An aching need to connect with something physical in the way he had always failed to or at best missed out on his opportunities with and then, once dead, could not manage, in the strange cooly misted place of those who should be resting but in which he, Quentin, with all his wanting, could not find peace.

"Q," Eliot said softly, "you don't have to do anything."

"No," Quentin said, his throat dry, "I know, but I," _I want, I want,_ so miserably Quentin wanted. To touch Eliot in all the places where he was alive in the way that Quentin was alive. He tugged at Eliot's waistband and shoved his nose into the coarse hair just below it. "Please, I need— "

"Jesus," Eliot sighed, even as he hooked his thumbs beneath the elastic and helped Quentin pull his briefs down.

Mindless, Quentin pressed forward, nuzzling into Eliot's groin, dipping his tongue in the crease of his thigh and then lower, the fur and the musk of him overwhelming and affirming and so painfully arousing that one of Quentin's hamstrings cramped. He moaned into it and mouthed inwards until his tongue cradled Eliot's balls and he had to use his thumbs to pry him open and push there. To lick in toward that tight furl of muscle as Eliot groaned and laughed and pulled at his hair, a lightness suffusing him which had not existed in the weeks before.

It was less about any particular act. Of course Quentin wanted Eliot's whole dick down his throat; of course Quentin wanted to lick at Eliot's ass until it slackened and eased for two or three or four fingers. But more than anything he wanted, he just— he wanted to find himself inside Eliot, to cultivate their own separate branching but equally splintered needs. To bend them back around their recent and gently formed time together, all of the new things that they might cultivate.

"I'm gonna," Quentin breathed, tonguing at the crease of Eliot's ass and thigh. "I want," a brief lick, further in, "can I," his tongue, just there, at the slightly bare place before the animal heat of him—

"Yeah, okay. Okay."

And then Quentin was lost. In the taste of him, the soft wet give of his muscle. The private delicacy of it. He loved the fit of the flat of his tongue against Eliot, how he pushed against Quentin's mouth, how his hands scrabbled blindly to pull at Quentin's hair but then relaxed, as if he wasn't sure what Quentin might want, as if Quentin did not always crave the feeling of Eliot's hand in his hair, against him, in him. 

First, Eliot gasped with each stroke of his tongue. Like he was surprised at how good it felt, or maybe surprised at Quentin's confidence. His ease. Because Quentin wasn't a fool, he knew that Eliot had never quite gotten over his initial shock that Quentin wanted him, and Quentin had spent a decade or more trying to convince him and he now would spend— however long it took, to make sure Eliot knew how badly he was wanted.

But then, as Quentin's jaw slackened and his chin grew wet with spit, Eliot's sounds turned equally messy. His gasps turned to groans and the quick jerk of his hips to a steady grind.

"Fuck," Eliot let out in a long breath. Quentin smiled against his skin, one hand curling around his thigh to pull him closer, and the other between his legs to hold him open, impossible and warm against his mouth. "Sweetheart, Q." Eliot's voice was ragged and Quentin kept smiling as he felt Eliot's hand move from the back of his head up to touch himself. See, he thought, I knew I could make this good for us again. I knew we would find our way back.

Quentin thought that he could do this for hours: lathe lazily over the sensitive skin while Eliot squirmed and moaned above him. Maybe he could pull Eliot down until he was flat on his back with Eliot above him, pressing down, rocking against his tongue. He moaned as he imagined how Eliot would work his hips, how he would ride Quentin's face until he came with a shout and was left trembling beside Quentin on the cool tile.

With a jolt, Quentin realized that he had spread his own knees in an attempt to grind against the floor, his own dick pressing against his jeans. He paused just long enough to palm himself, to relieve some of the ache, and to look up at Eliot, panting, his head thrown back, the stubbled bow of his neck on display.

He needed suddenly to be close to Eliot again. To feel the warmth of his living chest close to his own. Heavy with breath. On his knees he tugged off his shirt and reached up to pull Eliot down into his lap.

Eliot moaned and grabbed for his shoulder with one hand, pulling him forward to rut against Quentin's belly. Quentin chased his mouth for a kiss as his hips settled into a rhythm, slick and eager against him and Quentin thought then of chicken fighting in the shallow but not too shallow end of the Nishuane pool, July of 2009, when he had first thought Yes all right Julia, God, with your long hair gone to tendrils like a mermaid, I'll hoist you up because I am almost tall enough now to matter.

And then. The adolescent thrill of visible bodies: You can climb on my shoulders. In the memory— the muscles of her thighs tight around his ears and the strange wet feeling of arousal of which he was even then ashamed but that he could not deny, of what it was at sixteen to feel another person's body against his and to imagine the ways in which his body might touch their body, if only he would ask. 

How he had gone home and in his attempt to not think so much of the curve of her ribs and of her breasts he had jerked off in the shower and imagined Alexander who had sat behind him in algebra two that spring and wondered with a sudden heat what it might feel like lay his head against a flat and perhaps dreamily a furred chest and to press back against a hard dick between his legs.

He was here now. In Eliot's hands.

"God," Eliot sighed. Quentin pressed his face into the precious columns of his throat, breathing. Eliot. No one else. "I think about you all the time, like this," he said, "I want you all the time, I always did, I always do, you know that, right? Always, Q, you know that."

Quentin shuddered. Nodded. Overwhelmed in the feeling of being surrounded by Eliot, by his hands, by his thighs, by his skinny shoulders. Of his mouth on his neck and his chest and of his hands where they fumbled with the button of his jeans until Eliot's hand was around his cock and he was gasping. He thought You're all I ever could have wanted. Just this. With you. He ducked his face to nuzzle at the hair beneath Eliot's clavicle. 

Quentin moved to lay back. Eliot wrenched himself out of his shirt and followed him with kisses wet and warm. First at his lips and then down his neck and chest and belly until his mouth was hot above Quentin's cock. 

A moment suspended: Quentin with his clumsy hands hovered above Eliot's neck, afraid suddenly to touch as Eliot with his hot and wanting mouth took Quentin inside. His tongue tracing the underside. Slowly moving down until Quentin could feel the back of his throat and he grabbed blindly for Eliot's shoulder as he tilted his head back against the hard tile and let out a long and breathless El.

Always this. His jeans gone and Eliot's shoulders situated now between his legs. Eliot's hand splayed across his hip to keep him still. Eliot's beard beneath his palm where in a moment of thoughtless tenderness he had let it drift. Eliot's mouth. The desire to move and to fuck and to lick his own come from Eliot's mouth. Eliot's _mouth_.

Eliot reached up to take Quentin's hand. His mouth still hot where he moved. Quentin held him tightly and tried not to dig his nails too hard in his wrist. He felt when Eliot rolled his fingers slightly in his palm and when Eliot pulled up he was panting.

"Can you get me wet?" Eliot said. He tapped Quentin's palm and Quentin shivered, nodding. Moved his right hand in Eliot's left in a trembling set of motions until between their hands there was slickness.

Then the graceful movement of Eliot's hands which no longer seemed quite so broken. The immediacy of fullness with two of Eliot's cool and wet and thick fingers pressing into him.

Now Eliot by his side, one hand soothing his brow while inside him his fingers moved. Eliot's eyes on his face. The burn of tears in his eyes as Eliot kissed his cheek and left his lips there to linger as again he pressed with his fingers and Quentin shook. Against his belly his cock bobbed untouched and aching. 

Just this: Eliot's breath hot against his jaw. The indelible movement of his fingers and the press of them still deeper until something sparked low in his body and he gasped, breathing Eliot's breath. When he looked down he saw his own cock jerk and then drool and when Eliot pressed again his abdomen seized with pleasure. 

"That's it," Eliot said. The whisper of his voice next to Quentin's ear like a secret. 

With immense effort he tried to keep his eyes on Eliot's face. Since the first time he had done this— the shy redhead Sarah from 20th Century American Poets, out of her mind in Quentin's room while outside Julia's twenty-first birthday party still reeled had said, _I heard it feels amazing for guys_ and after Quentin had agreed with a wave of excitement and cheap vodka punch through his stomach had pressed one finger deep and it had hurt for her inexperience but it had been— unlike anything— and the first time some six months later when he'd gone back to that dark haired boy's hotel room at a Magic the Gathering tournament and thought that maybe they'd trade blowjobs and they had but then he— oh God had his name really been _Elliott—_ had asked if Quentin had wanted to fuck and he had been breathless— 

It felt sincerely stupid to ascribe it so much meaning. But to him it felt— always grounding. To have another person inside him in the way he was also sometimes inside of them. To be held. 

And so he kept his eyes on Eliot's face while inside him Eliot's fingers moved and he could see everything there of Eliot's expression.

"You're beautiful," Eliot said, even though Quentin thought he did not need to. He wondered not for the first time what Eliot saw in him but found himself unable to consider the question any further as Eliot withdrew his fingers and shifted onto his knees between Quentin's legs. To press against Quentin's skin with open palms. For a while he did not seem so much to touch Quentin's body as let his hands have free reign possessed with need as they were. Eliot's palms curving around his ribs. Eliot's fingertips grazing over his shoulders. The awed widening of his eyes as he let his hands at last come to rest against Quentin's chest. His heart.

Though his hands were still his eyes roamed. Underneath Quentin's skin something burned or simmered and he wondered if he was dying.

"What do you see? When you— look at me." Quentin could not stop himself from asking. Eliot tilted his head to one side.

"I see you," he said. Like it was just that simple. As if Quentin had since his resurrection looked at his reflection for more than a second or two. As if he had been able to stand it. 

"But this isn't— this isn't the same body. I'm not the same." He looked away and the tile was cold against his cheek or maybe his cheek was hot with shame. He closed his eyes.

"Does it feel the same when I touch you?" 

"Sometimes. Sometimes not. I don't know."

"How does it feel right now?" One thumb brushed under his eye then returned to rest warm and firm on his chest.

Quentin put his hands on top of Eliot's where they rested against his chest. He imagined them both sinking through his skin and his muscles and his bones to hold his heart steady. Something they might do together but which Quentin could not do alone.

Quentin remembered once when he was very small he had found a nest of rabbits in the backyard. He had thought initially to tell his father but it occurred to him that he might not like these small creatures who though currently harmless might one day eat his cucumbers and tomatoes or worst of all the pumpkins he grew special for pie each autumn. So he hadn't. He had kept them as his own special secret. He had learned from a PBS children's show that you should not pick them up and that if the mother was not around she would be back and that they were simply hidden. Safe keeping. He had watched them open their eyes and as their fur darkened. And then one day he had come back and the babies were gone and he knew that they had grown.

He had learned something he thought then. Reflecting on this incident in his teens and early twenties he had come to the manic profound conclusion of so many before him that growing up meant a departing. From a home and what you loved and from the crabgrass nest your mother had built. So much had confirmed that in the intervening years that he thought he had been wise.

And yet after everything he wondered if he had not been wrong. If maybe the end was meant to be a finding. A return.

When he looked up his vision was blurry with tears and his voice hitched when he said, "It feels good. Like, really good, El. It hasn't felt this good before. Not since I came back. I feel like at least right now my body is mine. I don't feel like it's just, I don't know, like carrying my brain around like a balloon on a string. I feel. Like I chose to be here."

"That's a good thing, right?" Eliot's smile then was— this was the person Quentin loved. The person who he looked at and thought You are the boy I love. The heart of you. All of you exposed.

"Yeah, it's a good thing. It's a really good thing."

Keeping his hands on Quentin's chest but curling them around to grasp at Quentin's fingers Eliot bowed to kiss him. There was little heat or insistence and yet Quentin felt full up with it. With both hands he held onto Eliot and opened his mouth and urged him in. It was still an effort but it felt easier now. Like he had strengthened a muscle or how after three months of getting only through the Wednesday crossword he suddenly found himself able to complete Saturday. It took time. But it was— possible.

And it felt good. The weight of Eliot on him. The unconscious movement of Eliot's hips as the kiss deepened of its own accord. The clean smell of him and the curls which now neatly tumbled instead of what they had done before which was not— unhandsome but which had not suited Eliot if Quentin was being honest. His hands. His beard. The sure line of his erection pressing against the back of Quentin's thighs.

"Q," Eliot half-gasped when at last he pulled away. "Do you want— can I— "

Quentin nodded and looped his arms around Eliot's shoulders. "Yeah, I, please."

There was fumbling and it was a strange sort of comfort to feel such a human thing. The awkwardness of lube and the shuffle of knees and clumsy casting and _Is this okay_ and _Does that hurt_. Eliot's hands tender where one rested in the crook of his knee and the other between his legs to— 

Quentin sighed. A relief. He thought I can do this. I can feel this good. And the ache between his legs and the slight burn as barely Eliot moved. Precious small motions. Inside me, he thought. I can hold him here and he can hold me. 

And he couldn't stop himself from laughing on another breath. The familiarity and the newness. He had done this with Eliot a hundred times and he was never not hopelessly turned on looking up at Eliot's delicate expression as he eased into Quentin's body. The stretch of it. The care it took. Quentin laughed again. Giggled into the crook of his arm which was flung above his head.

"What's so funny?"

"Nothing," he promised. "You're so fucking— big, Jesus."

Eliot bent down to kiss him and in doing so moved forward such that his cock pressed in another inch and Quentin gasped. "Been a while, huh?"

"No need to rub it in." 

"I'm not— I'm not," Eliot soothed and his eyes fluttered and his mouth curled briefly into a smile that Quentin knew had seen a thousand times he thought in torchlight and in daylight and in the dark. "I just. I've missed you."

Quentin's heart seized and he pulled Eliot close to kiss him again and again until he felt his heart giving again and with it his body, his heels tucked behind Eliot's back now pressing forward asking him to move while his hands cradled Eliot's face.

"Please, fuck, I want to feel you."

And he could— he could feel Eliot's cock in him. The deep press that made him gasp and made his blood pump hard between his legs. He reached down to feel the place where Eliot moved in him and felt the thin skin of his own body loose and wet and the thickness of Eliot's cock where he moved and insanely he wanted to cry. To feel this close to Eliot who he loved. 

He pushed Eliot back so that he was on his knees which slipped against the tile until from somewhere behind him Eliot passed him a towel to bunch up into a makeshift pillow and laughed when Eliot groaned pressing into him. He loved the feeling of that. When Eliot drove into him and when he jolted forward and kept his hands away from his heavy cock. All his weight balanced on a forearm that ached with the effort of it all and which made him feel more connected to the land of the living than he had in all of the previous weeks.

Eliot groaned as he tried to slow himself. "You feel good, baby?"

"God, yeah, El." Quentin nuzzled blindly against the towel. Against the hair on his own arm.

"Tell me, please. Tell me how it feels."

"You're— you always know exactly what I want." As if on cue Eliot seemed to still. Buried in Quentin. Until Quentin was whining and grinding back against Eliot's hips. Small circles. " _Please_ ," he gasped.

"Please what?"

"Don't, please, you know, you know. You know— what I want. Don't fucking act—"

"Yeah? I know what you want?" Eliot said and Quentin could feel his stuttering breath light with laughter.

"Shut up," he laughed, "please, just— tell me."

"Okay," Eliot said, "okay," and pulled out. Ran the head of his dick over Quentin's hole while he gasped. It seemed to go on forever, the miserable pleasure of it. His hips moved without his permission as he fought to stay still.

"You're gorgeous," Eliot finally said. Eased slowly back into him. "You're beautiful, so fucking— perfect. Can you feel me? Can you, you feel that? I know you like it when I ask, you're right, I know it."

"God, I can feel it, I can," Quentin promised and grabbed for Eliot's hand. He brought it to rest on his belly and kept it there and hoped that Eliot could feel the movement of his body inside Quentin's body as he pressed his palm up and against. 

"Oh, fuck, _fuck_ ," Eliot gasped. The hand on his hip tight and the one on his belly tense. Quentin felt a surge of power then. He smiled into his skin before he pushed back to force Eliot deeper. It almost hurt and it made him gasp but it was nothing for the way that Eliot fell helpless and limp over his back. His breath hot in the space between his shoulder blades at the same time it sent goosebumps all down his arms.

"Do you want me to come in record time, or—"

"Kind of," Quentin said. He couldn't recall the last time he'd felt this light. The last time anything had felt this easy. And he was of all things entirely sober. There was no barrier between them. It was just the two of them without anything else. 

Eliot only shook his head against Quentin's back and his movement picked up speed. It was only his gasps with the occasional gradation of his voice. Then the sound and the feeling of him moving. His hands tight on Quentin's hips. His breathing and the sharp sound of skin against skin and the delight and the joy of feeling his movements stutter and the look of awed anguish on Eliot's face as Quentin turned his head to look over his shoulder and smile. 

"Here, c'mon," Quentin said. He bullied Eliot onto his back and settled quickly back onto him. Laid his head against Eliot's shoulder so that they could hold each other while Eliot moved and Quentin's cock rubbed easily between them.

At the feeling of Eliot's hands on the backs of his thighs and his quickening breath Quentin relaxed. The steady build of pleasure low in his belly and the ache in his thighs and how it felt to give himself over to feeling good for once in a way that he might go so far as to describe as healthy. As actually truly good. The slip of his skin against Eliot's. 

"Do it," Quentin said. "You can come. I want you to. I do. I'm so fucking close, El."

"Fuck," Eliot breathed and brought Quentin's hips down hard against his own until there was nothing left to give but small thrusts. 

Intrusively he remembered that first time in a Hilton hotel room and how lucky he had felt that someone had wanted him in this way. It had not occurred to him then that he might be doing anything other than convincing someone else he'd be a half-decent or at least anonymous lay until once laid out on the bed with his shirt rucked up and his jeans pulled down to his ankles and the boy— maybe his name had actually been Eric? Honestly who knew and why did it matter— had hovered briefly over him to rake his eyes over his naked chest and with heavy appreciative breath say, _Shit, you're so sexy_ and Quentin had blushed and felt his dick twitch hard against his belly and— he'd realized that he might be desirable. That maybe his ability to give was not just in his desperate enthusiasm but in something particular about himself.

For a long time he had thought that it had been a fluke or that maybe he'd just been aching for praise in a way that spoke to his perennial immaturity. Self-aware enough to see it but not enough to change it. He had shoved down the revelation of his desirability to sit beside other childish hopes such as Maybe I Could Be a Writer and One Day I'll Feel Better.

But then he had kissed Eliot between stacks of tiles. And amidst the quadrangle of torchlight Quentin had straddled him and pushed their cocks together to make Eliot moan and when Eliot reached up to touch his face and said _You're gorgeous like this_ he did not explain himself and Quentin felt that same heady feeling of the newly beatified and had made a mess of them both. 

He felt that now. His sweaty chest against Eliot's. His toes pushing hard against the very ordinary bathroom tile to keep his balance. When he came he felt it he thought all over. His arms prickled and he felt the hairs all over his legs stand up as he shuddered and pressed his face into Eliot's neck with a moan. 

Through the pounding in his ears he heard as Eliot gasped and started to say _Oh my God_ over and over in a way that he had before always avoided. The sort of blasphemy that had been trained out of him or maybe in that moment a sort of prayer to which he allowed himself to return. Quentin pushed Eliot's hair back to see his full face in the fading light as he tipped his chin up and came.

Eliot laughed. Like always. Quentin laughed with him as he peeled himself away and laid against the blessedly cold tile, leaving one hand across Eliot's chest.

He closed his eyes and tried for once in his life to live in the moment. To absorb the joy of it. To lay beside Eliot who was beautiful and who had fucked him in just the way he liked and wanted and needed and to feel nothing less than alive. To feel at peace in his body which had lately been such an agony unto him. He breathed in and felt his shoulders press against the tile and was glad to watch the sunset settle over Eliot's skin which stretched over his bones.

It was not an exaggeration to call Eliot beautiful. It never was. He had always been arresting in his brocade and his velvet and earlier at Brakebills in his linen and his wool and as Quentin imagined before in his skinny jeans and button downs or maybe his ill-fitting secondhand trousers that he had not yet learned to tailor. Whatever it was that made up the Eliot that Eliot was before he had built himself.

Even now he was gorgeous in his longer hair and his widower's black. The color and fit he seemed unable to give up. Quentin had almost asked about it but had looked down to observe his own black jeans and button down and felt without room to pry.

But there was nothing Quentin thought that compared to Eliot naked on the floor with his hair stuck to his forehead and his neck. With his chest still given to the slight heave and the stretchmarks in his armpits and the dip beneath his ribs noticeably less concave than it had once been. The hair behind his ears drying into almost ringlets. Quentin wanted to reach forward and touch them and so he did. Trailed them around his index finger while Eliot sighed and smiled. 

"Does that feel good?" he asked, scratching his thumbnail through Eliot's sideburn. Eliot only hummed and turned his face into Quentin's palm. They laid like that long enough that Quentin felt himself drifting off. The warmth of the dying sun against his tacky skin. Eliot's big hand across the span of his ribs.

"You were right," Eliot finally said. By then the sun was almost gone. Quentin blinked against the last reflections against the tile and settled his hand on Eliot's neck.

"About?"

"Margo is my family."

Quentin nodded. "Yeah. She always has been."

Eliot rolled onto his side and took Quentin's hand. "I'm sorry I haven't— been the most forthcoming about everything. I really did want to give you space. I didn't want to burden you. I mean. I don't want to downplay what I've been through and I think I _am_ past doing that but I just thought that— I guess I thought nothing could be harder than coming back to life. And I didn't want to make that harder for you."

Quentin nodded. "I don't know. It just seems like, you know how at a certain point you've just been through so much that even the worst thing imaginable seems like just something else to add to the long line of bullshit? Even when it's like, objectively horrifying."

Eliot laughed. "Yeah. I think I have some idea."

"And I mean, not to get too metaphorical here but I've woken up after having my stomach pumped twice. I used to clock the tallest building any time I went into a new neighborhood, even if I was just visiting." At that Eliot squeezed his hand and a hurt expression crossed his face. Quentin squeezed back and hoped that Eliot could feel what he meant by it. The promise. The future. "My point is just— I've come back to life before. It sucks every time. But I always do it."

Eliot nodded and Quentin reminded himself to give Eliot more credit. That Eliot had wanted to die once, too. He brought Eliot's knuckles to his lips and traced them with his breath and when Eliot seemed soothed he held his fist against his chest. To feel his heart. 

Quentin said, "Do you want to call Julia tomorrow? I think it's time we start really looking for them. For Margo. I don't think we can put it off anymore. We might not be able to leave the house but we can still talk to people. We can still make progress."

"Do _you_ want to call Julia? You guys have had what, three calls in the last month?"

Quentin swallowed. Embarrassed again. Determined this time not to let the shame overcome him. "Two. I mean. It's just. Been weird for me, I guess."

Eliot nodded minutely. He seemed to think for a minute. His eyes crossed Quentin's face as if searching for something he had lost. Something he was certain was still there. Like a dropped earring in the grass. Keys in a grocery bag. He said, "You know Julia is yours, right? Your family, I mean." 

"Yeah," Quentin said. He ducked his face against the tile and looked up at Eliot. "I know."

Eliot moved forward to kiss him and at the warmth of his lips Quentin suddenly thought of all the forms that kisses could take. Affection. Contrition. Affirmation. Sympathy. Of everything in that moment he felt above all else— simply seen. Not just for whatever glowing thing in him that was good or for the ways in which he might care for Eliot. Just seen. Only himself. He felt stripped raw or at least naked and instead of running away he bent his body toward Eliot's and wrapped a leg around his waist. Just to be near. Only for closeness. Eliot placed a hand in the center of his back to hold him. 

"Okay. We can do that," Eliot said. His voice sounded sure. Quentin held on tighter. "We'll call her first thing."

—

The next morning Quentin woke up before nine a.m. which felt like an accomplishment to rival even his world-saving feats. He found Eliot awake and sitting already at the kitchen table, laptop open in front of him. Quentin left a kiss on his cheek and took his time making coffee. While he had promised that they would make the call he felt that same anxiety that kept him from making doctor’s appointments and picking up prescriptions and returning that shirt that really, truly didn’t fit— the familiar weight of it keeping him from acknowledging it. The endless nag of himself that felt impossible to overcome.

But that’s why Eliot was here. To make him follow through. 

He sat down beside Eliot with two mugs in his hands and watched in mute terror as Eliot without asking hit the green call button. It seemed to ring forever. Echoing in Quentin’s ears like everything he’d ever said wrong or which had hurt someone he loved. He began to bounce one leg on his toes and did not notice until Eliot’s steadying hand was there. Pressing down. Keeping him level.

The click of reception. On the screen only a blank wall with a window to the side but out of the speakers the noises of domesticity. Of a baby crying and a father soothing. Of _You sure you’ve got her?_ and _Of course, go take the call._

Then Julia was in front of them and Quentin felt like a floodgate had opened in his chest. Warmth seeping in between his ribs and filling his throat until it almost hurt to speak. Underneath the table he squeezed Eliot’s hand.

"Hey, Jules."

**Author's Note:**

> apropos of nothing, [this hymn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLH49g_aQV0) was a large part of the inspiration for this story.
> 
> i can be found on tumblr [here.](http://propinquitous.tumblr.com)


End file.
